Qobuz regularly replaces albums in their catalog. This causes the old Qobuz albums in your library to become unavailable. Methods have been found to identify these replacements (Focus > Channel Layout = Other), but they do not take away the significant effort of manually replacing scores of Qobuz library albums every once in a while. In this process all metadata (listening stats, tags, custom credits, custom artwork, etc.) are also lost.
What I would like to suggest is that the Roon-Qobuz integration be extended to automatically handle such replacements. This could be achieved using a very simple mapping table (Old album ID; New album ID) so that Roon can make the automated replacements in the user’s library. I realize that that would be the easy part: the copying of metadata to the new version, which may not be quite identical, might pose challenges.
Before people start stating that this suggestion already exists somewhere: I searched extensively and have only found related requests but none that actually address an automated process. If I missed something though, do let me know.
Yes, that would be helpful - I had to revise / re-record 50 (!) Qobuz albums in my library yesterday. After that, all the stats with the old versions of those albums are gone and songs you had in playlists are missing.
Well, I thought I had been doing a pretty good job over the years (Lifetime since 2015) keeping versions updated as necessary, but after a few playlist issues with “unavailable” tracks, I decided to do a deeper exercise, since I had some free time yesterday. What a time suck!!! I had 568 albums to replace! It took over 8 hours, mostly waiting for the remove/delete multiple clicks and spinning Roon sync.
So, my MAJOR suggestions would be to include an advanced/exclusive mode for editing. Roon can make it so that you have to go through three or more confirmations to get to this editing level, but then when you add a new version, you can then “delete” the unavailable version in a single click, with no delay and no waiting for it to process.
That way, if someone is unfortunate to be in a similar position, hundreds of albums could be replaced, and then when completed, to get out of the “exclusive” editing mode, the process would include a library re-build and database refresh, along with a new backup. So, those combined delays would all be into a single process, and drastically cut down on all the wasted time.
The most frustrating part for me was that after my Focused search for unavailable albums, and replacing about 540 albums, with the other 20-30 not having any replacement version, my search apparently didn’t include another 100-150 albums that had a song or multiple songs included in my playlists, of which I have about 100 of those with more than 40 songs (and some up to 1500 songs), and another 100 or so shorter playlists with less than 40 songs. So, I had another two hours of replacements, but it was too much work to also get the replacements back into the same order in the playlist, so they are now just clumped at the end…wating for another editing day.
Just to add my 2 cents, yes this would definitely improve the Roon/Qobuz experience. It’s definitely a pain to have to deal with the orphaned album versions manually.